Orton's Arm

Todd Collins Billy Joe Hobart Rob Johnson Doug Flutie Alex Van Pelt Drew Bledsoe Notice a common denominator there?

Even if Lindell had made the kick, the Bills almost certainly would have lost. The Colts were well within field goal range when they chose to kneel down to finish off the clock. With Adam Vinatari as their FG kicker, . . . um yeah. I say they would have gotten that FG, had they needed it.

You don't understand the phenomenon my simulation is intended to exhibit. You don't understand how my simulation was set up. You didn't understand the Wikipedia article about regression toward the mean, nor the HyperStat article to which I linked. You didn't understand that my simulation is set up in the same way, and intended to prove the same point, as the simulation to which HyperStat linked. Nearly every word you've written about the relationship between measurement error and regression toward the mean has been based on a faulty and incorrect understanding of the heart of the issue. You still don't understand it, despite my Herculean efforts to explain it to you.

Holcomb is an excellent practitioner of the death by 1000 small cuts style of offense. He's able to achieve success with that kind of offense even when the pass protection isn't there. That said, I don't see Holcomb as the answer. Would the Bills win a few more games this year, with Holcomb as the QB? Probably. But while those wins wouldn't get us to the playoffs, they'd get us further away from Brady Quinn. The way I see it, the team needs to play either JP or Nall for the rest of the year. If one of those guys shows something, you can ignore the QB position in the upcoming draft. If neither guy shows anything, then hopefully bad QB play will have led to enough losses that you can take Quinn.

I'd be patient with Quinn, assuming the Bills drafted him.

You weren't right the first ten times you said that. What makes you think you're right now?

I seem to remember more bad throws than that. But my bigger concern is that the coaches seem to be asking so little of Losman.

Kelly Holcomb has 21 career starts, so by your logic Holcomb's in his second year. I wonder how he'll look once he's a seasoned veteran?

Fair enough.

Look at other great linebackers who've suffered devastating injuries. Bryce Paup wasn't the same player after he got hurt. The same was true of Sam Cowart. Why should we expect Takeo to fully recover, when those two were merely shadows of their former selves?

1. A 3.9 YPC is pretty reasonable. Emmitt Smith's career average is 4.2 yards a carry; and that's with much better circumstances than any Buffalo RB can expect to enjoy. 2. An excellent question. It's probably a combination of things. There's no earthly reason why the coaches should trust the OL to provide more than 3 - 3.5 seconds of pass protection, even on a "good" play. So do they trust Losman and his receivers to make something happen within the 2 - 3 seconds he'll usually have to throw? Apparently they don't. The passing game was on a very short leash. It's not just the quantity of pass attempts, which was quite low. It was also the fact that these were usually quick, safe, simple throws. While I don't mind that stuff on occassion, at some point I want to see the Bills start to look like they have a real offense. I want to see the offense put more than six points on the scoreboard. This is a rebuilding season, so there's no sense in going with an older player like Holcomb. Maybe the Bills' coaching staff doesn't have much confidence in Losman, but feels even less confidence in Nall. I really don't know.

A few positives from this game: 1. The defense held the Colts' offense to ten net points 2. Anthony Thomas rushed for over 100 yards, with a very respectable 3.9 yards per carry. This, despite the fact the Colts probably knew they had to worry a lot more about the running game than the passing game. 3. Terrence McGee was responsible for ten points (fumble return for TD, and big return to set up the FG). 4. The Bills won the turnover battle 2-0. 5. The Bills only lost to the Colts by one point. That's a lot better than most of us expected. Now the negatives: 1. The offense produced only six points. 2. Losman was held to under 100 yards passing. Attribute that to Losman, to pass protection, to receivers, or to the coaches' lack of faith in any of the first three. But if you play Peyton Manning, you need more than 83 passing yards. 3. The Bills lost.

Give me a list of offensive linemen who failed under McNally only to find success elsewhere. If you hand a chef ingredients you found at the bottom of a dumpster, he'll cook you a meal that tastes like garbage. I don't care how good your chef is.

Losman had 83 passing yards today. The offense produced six points. At what point do you stop blaming everyone but JP, and acknowledge that he might be part of the problem?

That's not the way I set up my simulation. Each given member's true I.Q. stayed constant for the two tests. Therefore, someone who scored a 155 on the first error-free I.Q. test would score a 155 on the second, the third, and the fiftieth.

For some unfathomable reason, I was trying to be polite. This time around I'll be more clear: your earlier post demonstated a fundamental incomprehension of the principle of regression toward the mean. You just don't get it. If statistics was astronomy, you'd be Ptolemy. You will continue to fail to understand this concept until you become a little less arrogant, and a little more willing to read and understand either my posts, the articles to which I've linked, or both. Maybe you could even do a little simulation of your own to prove it to yourself. Create a population with normally distributed, randomly assigned I.Q.s. Give each person an I.Q. test based on their true I.Q. plus an element of luck when taking the test. Retest the ones who did the best the first time around, and see how their scores change. I've led you to water. Instead of drinking, you've spat it in my face. Die of thirst then. I've done what I can.

I feel your pain. In fact, if I had to make a bet on which position Marv will draft next year in the first round, it'd be CB. That said, it really stinks to watch the Bills get just enough wins to lose out on the D'Brickashaw Fergusons and Julius Peppers and Carson Palmers of the draft. I'd rather go 1-15, 1-15, 8-8, 12-4, 14-2; than go 3-13, 8-8, 6-10, 9-7, 5-11.

Thanks for taking the time to do all this. A great post.

A lot of what you suggest involves keeping the existing system intact as much as possible; with incremental reforms such as more personal attention or increased requirements for teachers. I tend to see the school system's problems as much deeper. The federal government influences education. Does the president, for example, care about educating children? Can future presidents be expected to care? Not necessarily. They have to appear to care, which is something very different. What about teachers' unions? Their track record is to actually oppose the real education of children in this country, for example by dumbing down textbooks. They clearly don't believe it's in their intrinsic interest to care. On the contrary, as long as the U.S. education system is messed up, they can always say that more money is needed to fix it. More money=more unionized teachers and bureaucrats=a bigger, richer, more powerful union. Then there is the American educational bureaucracy; which like American government bureaucracies in general tends to be inefficient and wasteful. The worse the education system gets, the more money politicians will tend to throw at it to try to fix the problem, and the bigger and more powerful the bureaucracy will tend to become. The problem with the U.S. education system is that money and power have been given to those who aren't necessarily interested in the education of children. You can't fix that problem with longer school days, or better-qualified teachers. You fix the problem by moving money and power into the hands of those who most want children educated--their parents. Once you do that, the other problems will tend to go away on their own.

I understand the number zero, which is exactly how much you've contributed to this thread.

I agree with all of your first paragraph, and large portions of your second. Suppose you could magically look beneath the surface to see someone's true I.Q. A man with a true I.Q. of 150 sits down to take an I.Q. test. He gets unlucky on the test, and scores a 140. Now you watch him sit down to take a second I.Q. test. If you had to guess in advance what his second score will be, the best guess is 150; because that's his true I.Q. The error term, as you point out, is expected to regress toward its mean of zero. But in the real world, there is no way of magically looking beneath the surface to see someone's true I.Q. The man who scored a 140 on the first test might be an unlucky 150, a luck-neutral 140, or a lucky 130. The unlucky 150s who retake the test are expected to, on average, get a 150 the second time around. The luck-neutral 140s who retake the test are expected to get an average of 140 the second time. And the lucky 130s are, on average, expected to get a 130 the second time they take the test. Suppose the underlying population had equal numbers of true 130s, 140s, and 150s. Someone who scored a 140 on an I.Q. test could just as easily be an unlucky 150 as a lucky 130. If someone scored a 140 the first time they took the test, their expected score the second time would be 140. This is because the 140 score is just as likely to indicate an unlucky 150 as it is to indicate a lucky 130. Now imagine there are 100 times as many true 130s as there are true 150s. Therefore, a score of 140 is 100 times more likely to signal a lucky 130, than it is to signal an unlucky 150. Imagine a room with people who scored a 140 on an I.Q. test. There are 100 lucky 130s, one unlucky 150, and a number of luck-neutral 140s. The average score for someone in this room the second time around will be less than 140. This is another way of saying that someone who scores a 140 on an I.Q. test the first time around will generally score somewhat lower the second time.

Since we agree about your second paragraph, let me ask you this question: why do you want to put more money into the education system that dumbed down those textbooks? Why do you want students to invest their summers into the education system that dumbed down those textbooks? Before we ask students to spend more of their time, or taxpayers more of their money, shouldn't we first ensure this time and money will be spent somewhat wisely? I saw a Harvard study involving school vouchers. The parents of disadvantaged inner city students were given school vouchers, and their children were tested after a few years. However, there wasn't funding for all the students that applied. Those who applied but were rejected formed the control group. Voucher payments represented a smaller level of per-child education spending than the public school system undertakes. Yet the voucher students did better than the control group. In fact, their improvement was so prounounced that in just a few years' time, 1/3 of the black/white education gap had been closed. This was done without resorting to summer schooling, and while spending less money per child than we're doing now. The U.S. school system has failed disadvantaged children. It's failed gifted children. It's failed middle class children of average intelligence. I suppose that the education system does a good job with special needs children from middle or upper class backgrounds, but that's about as far as I'm willing to go. The key to fixing the U.S. education system is to liberate dollars and children alike from the failed public school system.

Had you understood the underlying phenomenon, you would have known that in the examples you cited my choice of words was not poor.

I sometimes listen to Rush when I'm driving around. In the past, I've heard him defend various Rinos. You know how he does it? First, he acknowledges that an Olympia Snow or whomever is a Rino; and then he says, "but the most important vote this person will ever cast is for which party should control Congress." That's the only example of Rush "carrying the water" for these people which I've heard.

Thanks for adding to this discussion by actually sharing the numbers you found.